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Comment by abstractbill | Hacker News Reader

...it would allow Mibbit to readily spoof basic user identity.

What conceivable reason would Mibbit have for doing that?

Mibbit must be trusted to ... not allow proxy connections

No, that's not true. Mibbit must be trusted merely to pass-on the correct IP. Then Freenode's existing proxy detection can handle the job of rejecting proxied connections.

You are publicly calling into question Mibbit's integrity here, and suggesting that there's an incentive to give Freenode false information about users' IP addresses. Why?

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You are publicly calling into question Mibbit's integrity here, and suggesting that there's an incentive to give Freenode false information about users' IP addresses. Why?

Regardless of Mibbit's integrity -- of which I have no opinion, and am not calling into question -- freenode has absolutely no responsibility (contractual, moral, or otherwise) to extend their trust to any third party.

If Mibbit wishes to resolve the issue they can enter into a contract with Freenode to establish trust. Mibbit can provide a financial incentive and contractual guarantees, and in return Freenode can agree to extend Mibbit trust and administrative resources.

"You are publicly calling into question Mibbit's integrity here"

I know nothing about Mibbit beyond their web page and their colourful representative here, but - it's not about the personal integrity of the founder, or whatever. Mibbit's whole business model is around advertising. The more page views, the more advertising, the more profit. They have no investment in any other metric. It is reasonable to assume Mibbit does whatever they can think of to boost their usage.

"suggesting that there's an incentive to give Freenode false information about users' IP addresses"

There is a clear commercial incentive to encourage usage of the service. If sending random IPs to Freenode boosts revenue, there would be an incentive to do that. That would be reprehensible, of course, but you can't say there's no incentive.

Incentive or not, some of us have integrity and honor and choose to play by the rules of what is right. Not what makes the most money.

If I have $1million there is incentive for people to shoot me in the head and take my money. I guess that means that I should hide away in the mountains as a hermit and shun society, because everyone that is part of the society has an incentive to screw me over.

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